Using Which Version of Linux

[Mike Meyer]

Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> writes:
> On 2005-11-05, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
>> "Programmer-friendly" is pretty vague. Gentoo is the only Linux distro
>> I've run into (which excludes a *lot* of Unix distros) that I'd
>> consider programmer friendly, because it doesn't split packages up
>> into "user stuff" and "developer stuff". That means you have to
>> install two packages instead of one if you want to build things
>> against that software. On the other hand, it uses it's own "package"
>> manager - emerge - so you can't take advantage of rpms/debs from other
>> systems (or you couldn't last time I looked into it). It also installs
>> the least amount of "bundled" software, which I consider a programmer
>> friendly behavior.
> I just switched one of my computers to gentoo, and I like it a
> lot.  It's very no-nonsense, but there are alot of available
> packages and everything (so far) just works.  However, it's not
> for the impatient (or at least not for the poor and impatient).
> Since it compiles packages from source, a full-featured desktop
> install on a slow machine can take days to finish.

This is one of the things I love about the *BSD systems. The package
system is "two-headed". You an do pkg_add, and it'll act like yum or
apt-get, and install binaries for the package and all the
requirements for it. Or you can cd to /usr/ports/category/pkg-name
and do "make install", and it will download, compile and install all
the required software and the port you're building (I do that to
change the isntalltion prefix on the packages). If you want to create
customized packages, you just do "make package". I found creating a
port (and hence package) to be much easier than creating a .deb or
.rpm, but that may just be me. For real control, you can install the
portupgrade package.

That said, the author of the BSD ports system thinks the architecture
is wrong. It handles the building, installation, fetching and
requirements all by itself. He thinks the yum/apt-get approach, where
one tool handles package installation duties, and another deals with
requirements fetching is much saner.

           <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.